My musings on the New Testament, Early Christianity, Religion, Literature, and Other Phenomena and Ephemera.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Hekhalot Literature in Context

Rebecca Lesses, a few days back, has posted on a book from Mohr Siebeck that she contributed to called Hekhalot Literature in Context, edited by Ra'anan Boustan, Peter Schäfer, and Martha Himmelfarb. Her own piece is "Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature." Here is the info from the Mohr Siebeck website:

Hekhalot Literature in Context

Between Byzantium and Babylonia Ed. by Ra'anan Boustan, Martha Himmelfarb and Peter Schäfer

Over
the past 30 years, scholars of early Jewish mysticism have, with
increasing confidence, located the initial formation of Hekhalot
literature in Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian or early Islamic
Babylonia (ca. 500–900 C.E.), rather than at the time of the Mishnah,
Tosefta, early Midrashim, or Palestinian Talmud (ca. 100–400 C.E.). This
advance has primarily been achieved through major gains in our
understanding of the dynamic and highly flexible processes of
composition, redaction, and transmission that produced the Hekhalot
texts as we know them today. These gains have been coupled with greater
appreciation of the complex relationships between Hekhalot writings and
the variegated Jewish literary culture of late antiquity, both within
and beyond the boundaries of the rabbinic movement. Yet important
questions remain regarding the specific cultural contexts and
institutional settings out of which the various strands of Hekhalot
literature emerged as well as the multiple trajectories of use and
appropriation they subsequently travelled. In the present volume, an
international team of experts explores—from a variety of disciplinary
perspectives (e.g. linguistics, ritual and gender studies, intellectual
history)—the literary formation, cultural meanings, religious functions,
and textual transmission of Hekhalot literature.

Survey of contents:
Ra‘anan Boustan: IntroductionI. The Formation of Hekhalot Literature: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural ContextsNoam
Mizrahi: The Language of Hekhalot Literature: Preliminary Observations -
Peter Schäfer: Metatron in Babylonia - Michael D. Swartz: Hekhalot and
Piyyut: From Byzantium to Babylonia and Back - Alexei Sivertsev: The
Emperor’s Many Bodies: The Demise of Emperor Lupinus Revisited - Klaus
Herrmann: Jewish Mysticism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Merkavah
Mysticism in 3 Enoch - David M. Grossberg: Between 3 Enoch and Bavli
Hagigah: Heresiology and Orthopraxy in the Ascent of Elisha ben Abuyah -
Moulie Vidas: Hekhalot Literature, the Babylonian Academies and the
tanna’imII. The Transmission and Reception of Hekhalot Literature: Toward the Middle AgesPeter Schäfer: The Hekhalot Genizah - Gideon Bohak: Observations on the Transmission of Hekhalot Literature in the Cairo Genizah - Ophir Münz-Manor: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Hekhalot Traditions in European PiyyutIII. Early Jewish Mysticism in Comparative Perspective: Themes and PatternsReimund Leicht: Major Trends in Rabbinic Cosmology - Rebecca Lesses: Women and Gender in the Hekhalot Literature - Andrei A. Orlov: “What is Below?” Mysteries of Leviathan in the Early Jewish Accounts and Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 - Michael Meerson: Rites of Passage in Magic and Mysticism - Annette Yoshiko Reed: Rethinking (Jewish-)Christian Evidence for Jewish Mysticism

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About Me

I have a Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University. I am a visiting assistant professor at Illinois College. I have also taught at the University of Mississippi, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Columbia University. My research focuses on the New Testament and emergent Christian interactions with ancient Judaism in their Greco-Roman and ancient Near Eastern environments.